2,776 research outputs found

    The XII century towers, a benchmark of the Rome countryside almost cancelled. The safeguard plan by low cost uav and terrestrial DSM photogrammetry surveying and 3D Web GIS applications

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    “Giving a bird-fly look at the Rome countryside, throughout the Middle Age central period, it would show as if the multiple city towers has been widely spread around the territory” on a radial range of maximum thirty kilometers far from the Capitol Hill center (Carocci and Vendittelli, 2004). This is the consequence of the phenomenon identified with the “Incasalamento” neologism, described in depth in the following paper, intended as the general process of expansion of the urban society interests outside the downtown limits, started from the half of the XII and developed through all the XIII century, slowing down and ending in the following years. From the XIX century till today the architectural finds of this reality have raised the interest of many national and international scientists, which aimed to study and catalog them all to create a complete framework that, cause of its extension, didn’t allow yet attempting any element by element detailed analysis. From the described situation has started our plan of intervention, we will apply integrated survey methods and technologies of terrestrial and UAV near stereo-photogrammetry, by the use of low cost drones, more than action cameras and reflex on extensible rods, integrated and referenced with GPS and topographic survey. In the final project we intend to produce some 3D scaled and textured surface models of any artifact (almost two hundreds were firstly observed still standing), to singularly study the dimensions and structure, to analyze the building materials and details and to formulate an hypothesis about any function, based even on the position along the territory. These models, successively georeferenced, will be imported into a 2D and 3D WebGIS and organized in layers made visible on basemaps of reference, as much as on historical maps

    Supporting UAVs with Edge Computing: A Review of Opportunities and Challenges

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    Over the last years, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have seen significant advancements in sensor capabilities and computational abilities, allowing for efficient autonomous navigation and visual tracking applications. However, the demand for computationally complex tasks has increased faster than advances in battery technology. This opens up possibilities for improvements using edge computing. In edge computing, edge servers can achieve lower latency responses compared to traditional cloud servers through strategic geographic deployments. Furthermore, these servers can maintain superior computational performance compared to UAVs, as they are not limited by battery constraints. Combining these technologies by aiding UAVs with edge servers, research finds measurable improvements in task completion speed, energy efficiency, and reliability across multiple applications and industries. This systematic literature review aims to analyze the current state of research and collect, select, and extract the key areas where UAV activities can be supported and improved through edge computing

    Security, privacy and safety evaluation of dynamic and static fleets of drones

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    Inter-connected objects, either via public or private networks are the near future of modern societies. Such inter-connected objects are referred to as Internet-of-Things (IoT) and/or Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). One example of such a system is based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The fleet of such vehicles are prophesied to take on multiple roles involving mundane to high-sensitive, such as, prompt pizza or shopping deliveries to your homes to battlefield deployment for reconnaissance and combat missions. Drones, as we refer to UAVs in this paper, either can operate individually (solo missions) or part of a fleet (group missions), with and without constant connection with the base station. The base station acts as the command centre to manage the activities of the drones. However, an independent, localised and effective fleet control is required, potentially based on swarm intelligence, for the reasons: 1) increase in the number of drone fleets, 2) number of drones in a fleet might be multiple of tens, 3) time-criticality in making decisions by such fleets in the wild, 4) potential communication congestions/lag, and 5) in some cases working in challenging terrains that hinders or mandates-limited communication with control centre (i.e., operations spanning long period of times or military usage of such fleets in enemy territory). This self-ware, mission-focused and independent fleet of drones that potential utilises swarm intelligence for a) air-traffic and/or flight control management, b) obstacle avoidance, c) self-preservation while maintaining the mission criteria, d) collaboration with other fleets in the wild (autonomously) and e) assuring the security, privacy and safety of physical (drones itself) and virtual (data, software) assets. In this paper, we investigate the challenges faced by fleet of drones and propose a potential course of action on how to overcome them.Comment: 12 Pages, 7 Figures, Conference, The 36th IEEE/AIAA Digital Avionics Systems Conference (DASC'17

    Modular event-driven unmanned aerial vehicles control platform

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    Hoje em dia, os drones estão-se a tornar cada vez mais comuns nas nossas vidas diárias. Com a agilidade, acessibilidade e diversidade dos drones, eles são uma excelente plataforma para transportar dispositivos (p.ex., conjunto de sensores, câmeras, unidades computacionais de pequena dimensão). Assim sendo, são uma excelente ferramenta para tarefas como: explorar e estudar áreas perigosas, monitorizar campos de agricultura, ajudar na detecção e combate de incêndios ou vigiar multidões. Para realizar tais tarefas, ferramentas de automação e integração são essenciais, para que o desenvolvimento se concentre na própria aplicação e não nos problemas relacionados com a integração e automação do sistema do drone. Os drones atualmente disponiveis não são capazes de lidar com tais complexidades de forma tão transparente. Por exemplo, certos niveis de automação são ja possiveis, mas requerem hardware e software especificos do fornecedor; no que toca a integração, alguns já supportam SDK ou API para interagir com o drone, mas mais uma vez com a inconveniência de necessitar de conhecimento prévio sobre os sistemas dos drones. Para responder a estas necessidades, esta tese propõe uma plataforma modular de controlo baseada em eventos para abstrair os processos de automação e integração da complexidade subjacentes aos drones. Enquanto que a plataforma permite que as aplicações controlem e interajam com os drones, a sua complexidade é resolvida dentro da plataforma, simplificando o processo de integração. Além disso, com a plataforma proposta, a automação e funcionalidades do drone podem ser estendidas para estender as funcionalidades de drones mais limitados. A plataforma desenvolvida foi testada em diferentes cenários, tanto ao nível das suas funcionalidades como ao nível da analise de desempenho. Os resultados mostram que, além das funcionalidades suportadas, a plataforma consegue suportar o controlo e gestão de pelo menos até 64 drones em simultâneo sem ter modificações significativas nos atrasos de comunicação e throughput.Nowadays, drones are becoming more common in our daily lives. Since drones are agile, a ordable and diverse, they make an excellent platform to carry devices around (e.g., sensor arrays, cameras, small computers). With these capabilities, they become an excellent tool for tasks like: explore and study hazardous areas, agriculture monitoring, help on the detection and ght in res, and crowd surveillance. To perform such tasks, automation and integration tools are a must have, so that the development can focus on the application itself and not on the issues related with the integration and automation of the drone system. Current available drones are not capable of properly handling such complexities in a seamless way. For instance, some levels of automation are already possible, but require vendor speci c hardware and software; for integration, some o er SDK or API interactions, but once again with the inconvenience of requiring extensive knowledge about drone systems to implement. To address these issues, this thesis proposes a modular event-driven control platform to abstract automation and integration processes from the underlying complexities of the drones, while the platform lets the applications control and interact with the drones. The drones' complexities are resolved within the platform, therefore simplifying integration process. Moreover, with the proposed platform, drone automation and functionality can be extended across distinct brands of drones, while some may already support some features, others may not, and in that case the platform modules may intervene to extend the features of less capable drones. The developed platform has been tested in di erent scenarios, such as in terms of its functionalities and in terms of performance analysis. The results show that, besides the supported functionalities, the platform is able to handle the control and management of at last 64 simultaneous drones without signi cant changes in the communication delays and throughput.Mestrado em Engenharia Informátic

    Tools development to optimize the use of micro-drones for architectural cultural heritage survey

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    In view of the increasingly widespread use of inoffensive UAS for photogrammetric acquisitions in the architectural and infrastructural spheres, there is a need to be able to program flight missions suited to the operator’s needs. This contribution presents the results of two experiments conducted by the research group. The first proposed procedure, based on low-cost instrumentation and algorithms in a VPL environment, fills the gap of proprietary applications and allows the coding and customisation of flight missions for photogrammetry. Obtaining this information is not always easy; immovable or unforeseen obstacles lead to lengthy post-production of the photogrammetric cloud to remove them. The second procedure, by constructing an object segmentation framework, fills this gap by automatically processing photogrammetric images by recreating masks that remove unwanted objects from the dense cloud calculation. Despite some shortcomings, the results are promising and manage to make up for these shortcomings, at least in part

    A Deep Neural Network Sensor for Visual Servoing in 3D Spaces

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    3D indoor positioning of UAVs with spread spectrum ultrasound and time-of-flight cameras

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    Este trabajo propone el uso de un sistema híbrido de posicionamiento acústico y óptico en interiores para el posicionamiento 3D preciso de los vehículos aéreos no tripulados (UAV). El módulo acústico de este sistema se basa en un esquema de Acceso Múltiple por División de Código de Tiempo (T-CDMA), en el que la emisión secuencial de cinco códigos ultrasónicos de espectro amplio se realiza para calcular la posición horizontal del vehículo siguiendo un procedimiento de multilateración 2D. El módulo óptico se basa en una cámara de Tiempo de Vuelo (TOF) que proporciona una estimación inicial de la altura del vehículo. A continuación se propone un algoritmo recursivo programado en un ordenador externo para refinar la posición estimada. Los resultados experimentales muestran que el sistema propuesto puede aumentar la precisión de un sistema exclusivamente acústico en un 70-80% en términos de error cuadrático medio de posicionamiento.This work proposes the use of a hybrid acoustic and optical indoor positioning system for the accurate 3D positioning of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The acoustic module of this system is based on a Time-Code Division Multiple Access (T-CDMA) scheme, where the sequential emission of five spread spectrum ultrasonic codes is performed to compute the horizontal vehicle position following a 2D multilateration procedure. The optical module is based on a Time-Of-Flight (TOF) camera that provides an initial estimation for the vehicle height. A recursive algorithm programmed on an external computer is then proposed to refine the estimated position. Experimental results show that the proposed system can increase the accuracy of a solely acoustic system by 70–80% in terms of positioning mean square error.• Gobierno de España y Fondos para el Desarrollo Regional Europeo. Proyectos TARSIUS (TIN2015-71564-C4-4-R) (I+D+i), REPNIN (TEC2015-71426-REDT) y SOC-PLC (TEC2015-64835-C3-2-R) (I+D+i) • Junta de Extremadura, Fondos FEDER y Fondo Social Europeo. Proyecto GR15167 y beca predoctoral 45/2016 Exp. PD16030peerReviewe
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